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Published 2021-01-20
Creating Your Professional Brand
As you grow as a coach, more opportunities will present themselves if you know how to look for them. The more people know you, the more you build your brand, the more opportunities try to find you.
- Identify Your Unique Position In The Fitness Community
You must take time to think about what skills and experience you have that sets you apart from other coaches. Have you had a unique training opportunity? Maybe you have coaches athletes to the Games. Perhaps you have the level of education about a skill set that you can create your own seminar program to enable you to share your knowledge while making money. You don’t have to expect to start as an expert, but your pursuit of knowledge and sharing that knowledge will eventually get you recognition as an expert. You want to build your brand on what you can do and what you have done, not what you plan to do. - Be Real
Don’t try to change who you are; people quickly pick up on that. The point of personal branding is to share your personality with the fitness industry and grow a following of people who recognize you as an expert. Pretending you are someone you are not, or trying to speak above your knowledge level is something that will be picked up on by everyone you broadcast your message to. A common pitfall of coaches trying to climb the ladder in the industry is they pretend, or legitimately think they are smarter than they are. Remember, when trying to build your brand and following, don’t say anything that you can not back up with peer-reviewed research papers. - Define Your Target Audience
Do not merely throw your message out, hoping it will stick to someone who sees it in Facebook groups. You often see bad examples of someone trying to build their personal brand. It is common to be in a group for weightlifting and see someone share something in there about jumping rope or getting individual training clients or growing your gym. These “experts” are not experts. If they were, they would know they are pushing people away from their message by becoming pure spam. When you determine your target audience, you should find the right place to share your knowledge and content with them. This is why you do not see an expert mentor in our space like Will Hurst of Little Big Gyms posting in every possible group. Instead, he is very targeted when sharing his content, which helps him stand out as the top mentor in our industry. Being targeted in his content sharing is one of the reasons why so many gyms use his mentoring service. - Build Value
Have something to add. You can not share the same information as the rest of the world and expect people to hit your “Click Here To Learn More” link. When you do share your knowledge, including sources for your content will instantly give you more credibility than you would’ve had otherwise. - Share Wisely
Your story, news, knowledge, and information must be shared across all platforms, even if you do not personally use them. An example is BarbellJobs. When a gym places a job, it is shared on the BarbellJobs main website, Instagram, Instagram stories, the Facebook business page, Facebook groups in the area of the gym, it is shared on LinkedIn, in specific LinkedIn groups, on twitter, email, and Pinterest. It gets shared everywhere, but the sharing is targeted, not spammy. Jobs are not shared in groups for weightlifters if it is a general manager position. You should take the same approach, share it on all platforms, but identify where on those platforms your message will be well received.
Consistency = Brand Growth
Everyone has a blog, but not everyone is disciplined about updating it. The more you use your blog, the more search engines will grab it, bringing it higher in the results when someone is searching for something related to your scope of knowledge. A blog post every day will get you to the top of the search results, helping the community to identify you as an expert. Posting once a week and being on page 4 will not help you to be recognized as an expert.
If you are trying to separate yourself from the pack to get a better paying coaching position, perhaps a resume review with a phone call would help. Click below to learn more.
